The model for Mellors, DH Lawrence's gamekeeper who became Lady Chatterley's lover, was not a lieutenant in the Italian army but a 24-year-old Sicilian mule-driver seduced by Lawrence's wife, according to a new book.

The couple enjoyed a passionate affair during the summer of 1922 while Lawrence, already afflicted with tuberculosis, looked on in much the same way as the Sir Clifford of his fiction, Italian journalist Gaetano Saglimbeni claims in his book, Album Taormina.

Lawrence and his wife spent three years in a house near Taormina, Sicily, from 1920 to 1923. According to Saglimbeni, Peppino D'Allura, from the village of Castelmola, used to take Frieda Lawrence on his mule to visit a friend in the countryside.

One day the two were caught in a summer storm and sought refuge in an abandoned mill in the middle of a vineyard. According to Saglimbeni, Mrs Lawrence shed her wet clothes and ran naked through the vines, inviting her companion, who was 19 years her junior, to do likewise.

"She took his clothes off herself, violating his timidity. And Peppino also went wild. It was the August of 1922. That mill became their alcove for more than a year," Saglimbeni wrote.

"My father, who was from Castelmola, told me the story when I was a child. Everyone in the village knew about this boy who had talked of his adventures in the vineyard with the wife of DH Lawrence," Saglimbeni said yesterday.

"He used to tell the story in bars and hostelries, but he never spoke about it to journalists. He said that would have been unfitting for a Sicilian man of honour."

Saglimbeni said the mulekeeper bore a remarkable physical resemblance to Mellors - one of the world's best-known literary characters - while Lieutenant Angelo Ravagli, whom the Lawrences met three years later, was by contrast a handsome, jovial, sophisticated man with an impressive moustache: a far cry from the taciturn gamekeeper.

It has long been thought that Mellors was based on the lieutenant, whom Mrs Lawrence had an affair with and married after the novelist's death.

"A boy with calloused hands and a melancholy look, small in stature, slight, lean, accustomed to hardship, of few words and few smiles," Saglimbeni writes of D'Allura.

Mellors was moderately tall, lean and silent. "The man lifted his hat as he stood, showing his thick, almost fair hair. He stared straight into Connie's eyes, with a perfect, fearless, impersonal look, as if he wanted to see what she was like," Lawrence writes of their first meeting.

That look, according to Saglimbeni, was the look of D'Allura, who died in America in 1990 at the age of 92. It was not the placid regard of Lieut Ravagli, who is also said to have frolicked in the rain with Mrs Lawrence in a vineyard in Spotorno, Liguria.

"People said Ravagli was the model for Lady Chatterley's lover because the book came out two years after the Lawrences' visit to Spotorno. But Mellors is really much more like D'Allura in character and looks," Saglimbeni said.

"There are still old people living in the village who can tell you the story of their romance."